Green Acres

During my childhood, a favorite television show in our house was “Green Acres” – The New York attorney dreams of being a farmer so he buys a run-down farm and drags his wife away from the city to begin their own homestead in Hooterville USA. Each week we would tune in to watch Oliver and Lisa Douglas battle their way through the world of farming with lots of laughter.

Right now you’re probably thinking – Seriously, this woman is going to blog about Green Acres? Why?

Green Acres is the place to be,

farm livin is the life for me,

land spreadin out so far and wide

keep Manhattan just give me that countryside.

Yes, the Weeks are moving to the country. Living in a small Central IL community surrounded by corn and soy bean fields just isn’t small enough for us. Although, if things work out well, we may end up with more acreage than this small community sits on 🙂

I’ve had a growing desire to live a much more self-sufficient life. A healthier life. Not that we can’t live healthier and more self-sufficiently where we are now. We’ve actually been moving in this direction for some time now.

From the health standpoint, Dave and I are working hard to lose weight and eat healthier (I’m now down 23.4 lbs in the last 4 months and he’s lost over 13 lbs in the last 3 weeks using ViSalus). We’re eating less and what we’re eating is definitely healthier.

From the self-sufficiency standpoint, I homeschool the girls, make our laundry and cleaning products, and we have a garden (although gardening has pretty much been on the back burner for a few years). We also tend to be do-it-yourselfers, not with everything, but with many things.

However, we want to live a life that is even more self-sufficient than the one we can create here. We want to homestead and we have too many limitations where we are now.

There is a lot that has to happen before we can move forward with our plans. The big piece in all of this is selling our house, so our primary focus right now is getting it ready to put on the market with the goal of selling it as quickly as we can (that’s what every seller wants). Then we need to find and purchase land (5 acres is our starting point) and the list goes on. This isn’t going to be an over-night process at all, but it’s very exciting!

And for those who are interested, we will be staying in Central IL. We want to be self-sufficient, but Dave’s day job is going to be necessary for a very long time.

I anticipate we’ll have some Green Acres experiences during this process and although there won’t be t.v. cameras following us on this journey (although I may need to break out our video camera from time-to-time), we will certainly be blogging about our adventures. I’ll be blogging my thoughts and experiences here while hubby blogs his thoughts and experiences over at Homestead Hubby. Each time you visit me at World of Weeks, click the Homestead Hubby tab at the top of the page to follow his blog. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll blog about our new pig named Arnold 😉